Is Silicon Valley Actually Libertarian?

It’s long been believed that Silicon Valley is a hotbed for libertarian ideals, but where did that idea come from? Aside from some high-profile tech founders and investors who either identify as libertarian or express libertarianesque beliefs, does this set of ideologies really define the Valley? And what is libertarianism anyway?

You can follow Michael Calore on Mastodon at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Threads and @laurengoode, and Zoë Schiffer on Threads @reporterzoe. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: It has long been believed that Silicon Valley is a hotbed for libertarian ideals, but where did that idea come from? What is a libertarian and does the set of ideologies really define the valley? This is WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. I’m Michael Calore, director of consumer tech and culture here at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: And I’m Lauren Goode. I’m senior writer at WIRED.

Zoë Schiffer: And I’m Zoë Schiffer, WIRED’s director of business and industry.

Michael Calore: Today on the show, what is the relationship between Silicon Valley and libertarianism? OK, let’s ease in today with a story. Whomst among us has read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand?

Zoë Schiffer: A bedtime story. No, I’m just kidding. I haven’t read it. I honestly have very little desire to, but I am curious about it.

Lauren Goode: I have a memory of living in a fifth-floor walk-up in the East Village that was a pretty dilapidated apartment and trying to get through Atlas Shrugged for some reason and I couldn’t finish it.

Michael Calore: Yeah, it’s a doorstop.

Lauren Goode: Yeah.

Michael Calore: All right, well, I do want to give a quick recap of the novel because it is often cited as a defining text for libertarians. It’s about a couple of industrialists trying to run their big companies, but the government keeps getting in the way with all of their pesky regulations. So eventually, the situation gets so dire that all of the creative people, the industrialists and all of the imagineers of this society, they escape to a magical valley in the west where they live in their own society and that saps the world of their genius and without them propping up society, government crumbles.

Lauren Goode: Wasn’t there something also related to architecture?

Michael Calore: No, that’s The Fountainhead, that’s the other-

Lauren Goode: Oh, that’s what I tried to read. Clearly my memory from that time is not great. OK, please continue.

Michael Calore: That’s really it. At the end of the book, government is basically crumbling and society is going to be rebuilt with these new ideas about the power of the individual and low regulation and all of the themes that we now associate with libertarianism. There’s a lot of characters who give very long speeches in all of Ayn Rand’s books, and in this book there’s a character named John Galt who gives a very long speech that could basically be read as Ayn Rand’s philosophy of how government should operate, or in this case should not interfere with industry.

Zoë Schiffer: OK. It sounds really subtle. I wonder what it’s trying to say.

Michael Calore: So Atlas Shrugged had an outsize influence on the modern libertarian movement. It was written almost 70 years ago, and in the 1970s and then again in the 1990s, and then again in the 2010s and 2020s. Libertarianism has continued to be redefined. It has split into factions. There are several different schools of thought. There are social libertarians, there are right-wing libertarians, there are left-wing libertarians, but almost all of them look to this book as the foundational text for the principles of the basics of libertarian ideology.

Zoë Schiffer: OK, and what are the basics exactly?

Michael Calore: Well, it’s hard to give a tight definition that applies to everybody who calls himself a libertarian, but very broadly you can say that there are three main concepts. The first one is individualism. The idea that individuals can and should take care of themselves. They should practice individual autonomy and have total freedom. Number two is the suspicion of centralized power. So libertarians will traditionally argue for the minimal state, a government that does the absolute bare minimum in society and is not responsible for taking care of everybody, and they’re also anti-authoritarian. And then third, the importance of free markets, free trade, low taxes, all that stuff.

Lauren Goode: So we don’t have to squint too hard to see why these ideas resonate in a place like Silicon Valley.

Zoë Schiffer: Particularly for the last two, suspicion of centralized power and the importance of free markets, those feel like tenets that have come up again and again in recent years in the tech industry for sure.

Lauren Goode: And that’s why we all coalesced around this idea of we should do a podcast episode on libertarianism because there are some high profile tech founders and investors who either identify as libertarian or they express libertarian-esque beliefs. So on the heels of this consequential president election here in the US where we saw identity politics and debates over free markets come strongly into play, we thought we would just ask, what about the libertarians?

Michael Calore: Won’t anybody think of the libertarians? So what did we find out? Lauren, what have you learned about libertarianism and its place in this economy of Silicon Valley?

Lauren Goode: Well, I marched back to a place where Zoe and I both happened to have spent some time, Stanford University. You may have heard of it, Mike. Mike is rolling his eyes right now. We’ll just refer to it as that little college down in Palo Alto. And when I say that I marched down to Palo Alto, what I really mean is I did a bunch of research online and I found something called the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that offered a definition of libertarianism. And it’s some of what you said, Mike, that libertarians take individual freedom as the paramount political value. This definition also said that while people can justifiably be forced to do certain things, most obviously to refrain from infringing the liberty of others, they cannot be coerced to serve the good of other members of society.

Zoë Schiffer: Wait, what does that actually mean? You can’t be forced to pay taxes to support someone else’s social program?

Michael Calore: Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with taxes and just the idea of small government in general, like a minimal state that doesn’t prop up the welfare state. One good example of this that libertarians often cite is the criminal justice system. We throw a lot of money into the criminal justice system in the United States, and if we did not do that and we didn’t incarcerate people for their lives, then families would be more secure, people would be able to lift themselves out of poverty more easily. Another example that libertarians often cite is the education system, most of which is funded by the government and the states and in libertarian’s view, and I’m sure a lot of people’s view, is doing a poor job of educating our children. And if we did a better job of educating our children, then they would be less likely to commit crimes and fall into poverty and they would go on to have lucrative jobs that can provide. So it’s less about just not funding programs that take care of people and more about redoing the way the government operates and props up all these systems that are fundamentally flawed.

Lauren Goode: I also think the part about how you cannot be coerced to serve the good of other members of society from a sociological perspective, if not a high-minded philosophical perspective, I think that that means that you can do kind things for your neighbors or help them out in a pinch if you feel that that’s the right thing to do, but that ultimately that should not be top-down assistance. You shouldn’t be relying on the government for that.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Zoë Schiffer: OK.

Lauren Goode: So in short, libertarians typically endorse something like a free market economy, and they usually look at the way contemporary democratic states redistribute wealth as something that is unjustified. It’s a form of coercion that they’re not on board with. What’s interesting is that this philosophy was first published online in 2002, and then there’s a note that says in 2023, this was “substantially” updated, which gets to the point of this episode, the philosophy of libertarianism has changed a lot.

Michael Calore: Yeah, and the “modern” libertarian movement of the 1970s was really a reaction to the rise of the welfare state, that idea that the government is redistributing people’s wealth. And obviously the internet has changed a lot about that, but how has it changed? Where are we now in 2024, 2025?

Lauren Goode: Well, I think in order to get to where we are in 2024, we have to go back to the mid 2010s around 2017, which is when the Mises Caucus was formed. This is a caucus that began to push the Libertarian Party further to the right. Some people have described them as edge lords, and it’s a break away from the more highbrow, intellectualized, economically focused free enterprise class of libertarians. There tends to be a little bit more hostility towards the state and the Fed, but there are also some progressive issues like LGBTQ rights or supporting immigration or abortion that they feel like should get less emphasis. Basically, there are now factions of libertarianism that are a lot more anti-woke. And a lot of this I was reading in Reason Magazine, yes.

Michael Calore: What is Reason Magazine?

Lauren Goode: It’s essentially a monthly trade mag for libertarians, so don’t you worry, Mike, the libertarians have their own magazine. It’s run by the Reason Foundation. It was founded back in the 60s. Its tagline is Free Minds and Free Markets. In the early 2000s it actually did this stunt that I wish WIRED had thought of. According to Wikipedia, subscribers to Reason Magazine once received a personalized issue that had their name and a satellite photo of their home or their workplace on the cover. It was like a customized cover for all of their subscribers, and the whole idea was to demonstrate the power of public databases.

Michael Calore: Wow.

Zoë Schiffer: Oh my God, I love that.

Lauren Goode: So Reason has been covering this shift in libertarianism and they’ve gotten some pushback, too, for their coverage. But the fundamental idea is that some of the OGs, the true believers of libertarianism still believe that the individual is best suited to make their own decisions about how to live, that there should be minimal government intervention, whereas some of the new factions have adopted the messaging of nationalism and nationalism is ultimately collectivist.

Zoë Schiffer: So I feel like I’m finally starting to see how this change has spilled over into Silicon Valley.

Lauren Goode: How so?

Zoë Schiffer: Not just the concept of individuals making their own decisions, but the idea that Silicon Valley should make its own decisions and definitely not the government. And also, the shift that we’re talking about with libertarianism getting more conservative and embracing the anti-woke mentality, that shift has been something that Silicon Valley elites have been talking about very, very loudly for the last couple years.

Michael Calore: Right. The other thing that I think really resonates with Silicon Valley is the idea that the individual who has the great mind and the great creative drive should not be stymied. They should not be held back from creating and building the founder mindset. That person who is just dedicating their entire life to getting rich and changing the world, they should be given free rein to do that.

Lauren Goode: Time to build, Mike.

Michael Calore: That’s right. Time to build. And really, I think that’s why Atlas Shrugged resonates with so many classic, I’m using air quotes in a capital C classic libertarians, just because it’s about that drive of the individual to push society into a better place without the government stepping in and taxing them and regulating them and telling them that they can’t do that. It’s interesting that this anti-woke shift that you talked about, Lauren, is something that has been going on for decades because Ayn Rand, who lived until the early 80s saw this right-wing faction of libertarianism emerging and she spoke out against it.

Lauren Goode: Oh, interesting.

Michael Calore:

Yeah, she called them hippies of the right.

Lauren Goode: Oh, interesting. There’s so much co-opting going on in these identical politics.

Zoë Schiffer: OK, so to bring it back to today, the shifting definition of libertarianism is happening as general views of the government have been changing, right?

Michael Calore: Yeah, and especially changing in the last election cycle, you could say. But we’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, we’re going to look at how many of these ideas have become concrete in Silicon Valley through concepts like cryptocurrency and seasteading and automation and universal basic income. So we’ll be right back.

[break]

Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Let’s start with who we know actually identifies as libertarian and what that means to them. So we’ve got a few people to talk about. Zoe, I want you to go first because I want you to tell us about Peter Thiel.

Zoë Schiffer: OK, finally a topic I do feel uniquely confident in. So Peter Thiel is one of the most well-known people in this space. In Silicon Valley, he’s probably best known as the person who cofounded PayPal with Elon Musk.

Lauren Goode: The so-called PayPal Mafia.

Zoë Schiffer: Exactly. In the media, he’s known as the person who helped sue Gawker into the ground. But to me, he’ll always be the person who was riding shotgun with Elon Musk when they crashed Musk’s uninsured McLaren F1 on Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto.

Lauren Goode: I don’t think there’s a more Silicon Valley sentence that’s ever been uttered on this podcast.

Zoë Schiffer: Probably not. I don’t think we can top that one. But Thiel is also a self-proclaimed libertarian, which has led to his embrace of things like crypto and seasteading, which is the autonomous floating communities that exist outside government jurisdiction. And more recently, his embrace of right-wing political candidates like JD Vance and Blake Masters.

Lauren Goode: OK, not just candidates now, but our incoming VP. Seasteading, wait, we have to go off on a little tangent. Where would the boat be parked? Is that what it’s called? Docked? Where is this? What does it mean?

Michael Calore: Anchored?

Lauren Goode: Anchored, thank you.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, lest they float into government jurisdiction, which is very anti-seasteading.

Lauren Goode: What part of the sea?

Michael Calore: I think if you go out about 13 miles.

Lauren Goode: OK, OK. So it’s not like you would be surfing one day and you would stumble upon Peter Thiel’s seasteading community.

Michael Calore: You know when you go on a cruise and you get far enough out that they allow you to gamble?

Lauren Goode: I’ve never been on a cruise, but this is good to know. OK, so it’s like that.

Michael Calore: You get far enough out and the laws don’t apply anymore.

Lauren Goode: OK, OK. Got it. Wow.

Michael Calore: Lauren, who are some others in this crowd?

Lauren Goode: Someone else who we should mention, Balaji Srinivasan. He’s an investor who, in 2023, announced his own fund with the goal of developing new libertarian societies. And he would call these network states, which doesn’t sound ominous. Also involved in this fund, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, AngelList cofounder, Naval Ravikant, even Fred Wilson was involved in this fund. And there are a lot of strong crypto ties here, but the whole idea is that there will be these Bitcoin based groups based on open source and peer-to-peer and internet values. And Vice did some reporting on this and wrote that the ultimate goal is to create new communities that have their own experimental versions of institutions, but once again run by private companies.

Zoë Schiffer: We said we couldn’t come up with a more Silicon Valley sentence. And then you said Bitcoin based groups based on open source and peer-to-peer, so well done to you.

Lauren Goode: It’s hard to follow in a podcast. I feel like you have to see these ideals written out and do some jumps in your mind to fully understand what’s happening here. I listened to something called the Protestant Libertarian podcast ahead of this episode to try to prepare, and I kept stopping and going back 15 seconds and re-listening and truly trying to grasp what this is all about.

Zoë Schiffer: And that’s a reporter, folks. For no reason whatsoever, I’m just going to say there’s a retroactive allegedly that applies to everything we just said about these men. Moving on. So my understanding is crypto is attractive to libertarians because in theory it’s a way to get around government backed fiat currencies. You can trust in the blockchain versus a centralized authority figure.

Michael Calore: Yeah, and it’s also very transparent. And that’s something that appeals to anybody who’s interested in personal liberty. They want their systems to be fully understandable and transparent. We talked through some of the people who identify as libertarians in Silicon Valley. So let’s dig a little bit deeper into how the ideology fits into Silicon Valley.

Lauren Goode: Right, it feels like there are these ideas coming from people who aren’t necessarily Libertarian with a capital L, but they espouse some of the beliefs of it.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, I think to start out, we should touch on Marc Andreessen’s 2023 self-published manifesto, the Techno-Optimist. Andreessen is a software engineer. He’s cofounder of Netscape and also cofounder of one of the most prominent venture capital firms in the valley. Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z as it’s sometimes called, at its core, this manifesto or blog post, really, is an argument for the acceleration of tech innovation and development. In this view, tech is life, tech is happiness and tech solves all of the world’s problems. And the concepts in the manifesto are very libertarian. They’re things like growth is progress, the things that help growth are population growth and technology naturally. And it says things like, “We believe in free markets and that they’re the most effective way to organize a technological economy.” And it also really links people who are interested in content moderation or sustainability or trust and safety as being anti-progress and anti-everything the manifesto stands for.

Lauren Goode: Interesting. Zoe with something like, I don’t know, just content moderation or sustainability, ESG, we report on these issues within tech companies a lot, but broadly, what do those mean and why would those be anti-growth?

Zoë Schiffer: My understanding is that with trust and safety or content moderation, they see these groups as really standing in the way of progress and slowing down the product development cycle. When we’re thinking of trust and safety in particular, those teams are the ones being like, “Wait, we need to understand how the product is going to impact users.” And I think you could have the view that trust and safety is actually a core part of the product development cycle. There’s a phrase that I like a lot that content moderation is a product and it’s a thing you can sell that will make your company more valuable, but they really don’t seem to see it that way.

Lauren Goode: Interesting. And the a16z manifesto, it went pretty viral.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, Lauren, even on Threads. People were posting about it in real time, I might add.

Lauren Goode: I refuse to believe it went viral on Threads.

Zoë Schiffer: It did, it did.

Lauren Goode: Were people just copying and pasting it as like clickbait and not attributing it?

Zoë Schiffer: They were reposting their LinkedIn posts about it, yeah.

Michael Calore: Yeah. I think a lot of people were making fun of it just because it came across as quite pompous. A lot of the ideas were very self-important.

Zoë Schiffer: Right. I feel like a lot of the tech CEOs honestly do agree with it and they have this mindset and then everyone else was like, “The way this is written, oh my God.”

Michael Calore: It opens with, lies, we are being lied to.

Lauren Goode: You know how earlier in the show I said I went back to Stanford University online and opened the big book of philosophy to define libertarianism. After that, I simply took a 10-minute jaunt up the road to Sand Hill Road and opened the Bible there. And the Bible is actually Marc Andreessen’s manifesto.

Zoë Schiffer: And it just says lies, lies, lies.

Michael Calore: The other thing about it that really rankled people was the fact that it defines who the enemy of the techno optimist is. And it’s the person who is pushing for ethics. It’s the person who is pushing for let’s slow this down and take this carefully so that we don’t screw up royally.

Zoë Schiffer: Right, which I feel like the ethics teams do really take issue with because they’re like, “We’re not trying to slow it down. We’re trying to be embedded in the product development cycle and help it and help you make money ultimately.”

Lauren Goode: Right, but from the perspective of some venture capitalists, they believe that having unfettered growth allows them to literally grow the economy and therefore create more jobs. And this is all good things.

Michael Calore: Yeah. And one of the most cited parts of the manifesto is the idea that technology can solve all of the world’s problems, and that if you stand in the way of technology growing, that you are actively killing people.

Lauren Goode: Really?

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: I don’t remember that part of it. I might’ve blocked it out. Interesting. And these are investors who you’ll sometimes hear them say they’re not necessarily just investing in a company, they’re putting their belief in a certain entrepreneur. They feel very confident that the leader of this startup, the person who’s pitching the idea, that they can execute, they can see it through. And that, in a way, goes back to this whole idea of individualism too.

Zoë Schiffer: Right, yeah. They also don’t mention editors anywhere in the manifesto, but oh my God, I certainly feel like they would help.

Michael Calore: Yeah, there’s a lot of ideas there, a lot of beliefs. In what ways are these beliefs being put into action?

Zoë Schiffer: I feel like UBI or universal basic income is one way. We know that Sam Altman is involved in an experiment to see what happens when you give people a fixed amount of money every month. This idea has been popularized with various political candidates who are like, “What if the government handed out a little bit of cash and allowed people to spend it on whatever they want versus having a traditional welfare state?”

Michael Calore: Right. And it doesn’t seem like a very libertarian idea for the government to just give people money. But if you think about it, you can see how it’s attractive to libertarians because like you said, Zoe, it is a replacement for the welfare state. It also reduces some of the friction that happens when you have ultra wealthy people in society. If you have a widening rich poor gap, the people on the poor side of that gap, if they have all of their basic needs being met by universal basic income, then that allows the people on the rich side of that gap to accelerate their growth as much as they really want without a lot of the social pressure and laws getting in the way of redistribution of wealth.

Lauren Goode: Scale, scale, scale.

Zoë Schiffer: Mike, you’re saying this isn’t purely altruistic?

Michael Calore: Unfortunately, no. Also, we should point out that Silicon Valley is really interested in technologies that introduce automation into business. And if you’re introducing automation into business, it’s going to result in people losing their jobs. Universal basic income provides a safety net for those people and, again, allows those working on automation technologies to accelerate the work that they’re doing without worrying about putting millions of people out of work.

Zoë Schiffer: You sound a little bit like a techno pessimist.

Michael Calore: I’m not necessarily a techno pessimist.

Lauren Goode: It feels like the techno utopian cities are part of this too. They’re not explicitly libertarian ideals, but they sort of are.

Michael Calore: Well, we should talk about those.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Last year, The New York Times, I think we’ve all read the story, they reported on this secret $800 million plan from Silicon Valley elites. This included investors like Andreessen, also Reid Hoffman, Michael Moritz, Laurene Powell Jobs, the Collison brothers, the Irish entrepreneurs who run Stripe. The whole idea was that they were going to build an entirely new city from scratch in Solano County, California. Have you been there, Mike? I’ve never been. It’s about two hours northeast of where we are in the Bay.

Michael Calore: I’ve driven through it without knowing that I was driving through it.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Michael Calore: There’s nothing there.

Lauren Goode: OK, OK. So their idea is that they’re going to build a whole new city there from scratch and from a practical perspective, the Bay Area is very expensive. There isn’t a lot of housing. We have trouble building housing, so maybe expanding this area isn’t a bad idea. But as the Times pointed out, this whole thing has its roots and the time to build, free enterprise thinking. There was also a proposal by Y Combinator several years ago, which is this startup incubator here in San Francisco trying to also turn empty land into this new society. We talked about seasteading, the Seasteading Institute, basically building a new society on lily pads or concrete blocks or whatever it is. So once again, we can’t say for sure how many of these folks are hardcore Ayn Rand fans, but this is the modern 2024 Silicon Valley version of this free enterprise, free thinking cyberspace will save us all type ideology.

Zoë Schiffer: When we’re talking about the utopian society and it’s building more housing in the Bay Area, honestly I’m all for it.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, I think that they’ve run into some road bumps with this project was the last that The New York Times reported, but I’m guessing it’s not the last we’ll hear of it.

Michael Calore: Yes. And if this project doesn’t get off the ground, another one will for sure.

Lauren Goode: Eventually. And maybe we’ll all be moving there. We’ll be the local press.

Michael Calore: So for a very long time, the prevailing thinking in Silicon Valley has been one that meritocracy rules. The person who earns their position through the execution of their ideas is the one who should be given more power and more resources to continue growing their ideas. So how does that concept of meritocracy in Silicon Valley overlap with libertarianism?

Lauren Goode: Yeah, that’s a good question. This goes back about a decade now, but there’s this reporter, Jodi Kantor. She was working on a story about the Stanford class of 1994 and all of the bold names from that cohort who were pretty much responsible for the modern internet economy. And this included an entrepreneur and venture capitalist named David Sacks. Some of you may know who he is from recent Twitter election discourse, but he famously wrote in an email to Jodi that meritocracy is one of his “core values.” He said that when he has hired and promoted women, it was because they were the top candidates, that he chooses the best person for the job. He wants to foster a culture of excellence within his companies. And that is the idea of meritocracy in a nutshell, that you’re just going to hire the best people who could do the best job and you’re not going to take in other considerations. Sacks, for what it’s worth, also wrote for the Stanford Review, which is a conservative libertarian campus newspaper. And guess who else wrote for that?

Michael Calore: You?

Lauren Goode: Peter Thiel.

Michael Calore: Oh, Peter Thiel.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, Zoe, that’s what I was going to say.

Zoë Schiffer: That would be quite a plot twist.

Lauren Goode: But I think we’re getting back to this idea that meritocracy is a little bit of a myth, particularly in Silicon Valley. I think we all know of examples where it is not always the most talented, smartest, most hardworking person that finds their way to the top or into a better life. There’s all kinds of cronyism, nepotism, you name it, that happens in Silicon Valley and in other institutions, like government where sometimes the people who are not the most qualified end up in elevated positions.

Zoë Schiffer: I always think of the analogy, too, of if two people have won a race and they’ve gotten the exact same time, but one person ran against severe headwinds, that person is probably the better runner, but it looks like they got the exact same time.

Lauren Goode: But I think we’re getting back to this idea that meritocracy is great if you are a white man or a man because, statistically speaking, Silicon Valley is still largely composed of men. And now with some of those folks who are a little more are leaning now, who are fighting back against the corrective efforts like DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion within companies.

Zoë Schiffer: My favorite David Sacks story is that shortly after his company went public and he became like a multi, multi-millionaire, billionaire, he hosted a 40th birthday party that was Marie Antoinette themed. And the tagline for the party was Let Him Eat Cake.

Lauren Goode: Once again, I would like to know why I am not invited to these parties along with the don’t die dinners.

Zoë Schiffer: Snoop Dogg was.

Lauren Goode: Oh really?

Michael Calore: So do you want to hang out with the libertarian royalists?

Lauren Goode: Just fly on the wall. I want to hear all the viewpoints.

Michael Calore: Sure, why not? All right, we’re going to take a quick break and when we come back, we will ask the question that we have been building to, is the prevailing ideology in Silicon Valley actually libertarian?

[break]

Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. So we’ve been talking a lot about the ideology of libertarianism and how it’s been put into effect in Silicon Valley, but of course, Silicon Valley is not a monolith. There are millions of people living and working there who have very different ideas about how involved government should be in the economy. And I just want to get to the heart of the matter. Can we call Silicon Valley libertarian? Can we put that label on the economic and social system that is at play in Silicon Valley?

Lauren Goode: Yeah, this is a good question. Yes and no. The libertarians are a small bunch. Some of them are just also a very vocal and powerful bunch. There was this survey at Stanford, I think this is the last time we’re going to mention Stanford University on the show hopefully. So in 2019, there was this Stanford survey of successful tech entrepreneurs. And the survey was about their politics, and what it revealed was this new class of political animal called—David Attenborough voice—the liberaltarian. The research basically showed that when it comes to things like taxation, social issues, trade, that a lot of wealthy tech founders are more liberal than all but the people who are really, really far left.

But then when it comes to regulation, maybe unsurprisingly, these people tended to be more conservative than most Republicans, and, in fact, look a little bit more like libertarians as we originally think of them, hence the term liberaltarian. So we have this interesting combination of values here. Of course, that was 2019, and we know that politics in the valley have shifted since then. It’s a little bit harder to define right now. And I think when you actually look at the voting data of the geographic areas of Silicon Valley, let’s say Santa Clara County, San Mateo County, the broader San Francisco Bay, people do still tend to vote mostly democratic.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. I don’t even know how helpful it is to figure out if the exact label applies here. To me, it certainly seems true that the traditional libertarian ideals are still relevant today and honestly perhaps more relevant today than ever before because we just had this huge election. And among other things, it was the first time that a Republican won the popular vote since 2004. And things like tax reform and deregulation and infrastructure investment were central issues in that election. And some were being pushed by tech elites who seemed to have played an outsized role.

Michael Calore: Yeah, for sure. I think if you look at where Silicon Valley originally got labeled as libertarian, you have to look back at the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace, which was written in 1996 by John Perry Barlow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where he basically says in so many words, “Government, you are not invited into this space. We built this without you, and we built it for us, and we will govern ourselves.” And that was a rallying cry for the early internet. 1996, the web was only a few years old at that point. And I think for a long time that held as the truth because the government just did not understand technology. Some of the most foundational regulations of the tech industry were written by the people in the government offices who understood it the best. But the big players in Big Tech in Silicon Valley were not as much of a part of the conversation.

And as we’ve progressed and technology has become a bigger part of our country and our economy and our social fabric, those big tech companies are getting more and more and more involved in government. So you may have these libertarian ideals about no regulation and free markets, but there’s also an understanding that if you’re going to make sure that the regulation is favorable to you, then you do have to be involved in those discussions. So there’s big money being spent on lobbying, cozying up to political candidates, sending out huzzahs on Twitter when they win. You see a lot of that happening from the same people who may not believe that government should be involved in their industry.

Zoë Schiffer: So the idea of less government seems stronger today than it did before, at least in the way that people voted. I keep thinking about this quote from the libertarian writer and researcher, Greg Ferenstein. It was in an interview he did with Vox, and the quote was, “The Silicon Valley ideology thinks about government as an investor rather than a protector, arguing that government’s role is to invest in making people as awesome as possible.”

Lauren Goode: So it’s like, “Oh, I just raised my 40 million Series C from the Fed.”

Zoë Schiffer: Right.

Michael Calore: I read it as support for universal basic income. The government should invest in making sure that everybody can be as awesome as possible by providing for the basic needs of everybody who is not awesome in their eyes.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah.

Michael Calore: So my final question is, what’s to come? How do we feel this is going to play out in the future?

Lauren Goode: I’m going to toss that back to you, Mike. What do you think is going to happen in the future?

Michael Calore: I hate to be the guy … Well, no. I love to be the guy who’s always talking about universal basic income, but I do think that universal basic income has a place in society, especially if we’re going to keep driving towards automation. It’s something that we should be seriously considering. And I do think that it’s a good place for the government to step in and provide for its people, and you can do that through taxes. We’ve talked about how libertarians in Silicon Valley are OK with taxation if it allows their companies to keep growing. And I think this is a good safety net. And what I don’t think is in the future is the dismantling of the welfare state that already exists and using universal basic income as a replacement for it. But I do think that things have gotten so dire in our society with the rich, poor gap and the balance of power that universal basic income could provide a good leveling force with the forward march of technology.

Lauren Goode: It sounds like you’re a little bit aligned with the successful tech entrepreneurs who were surveyed by the junior college in Palo Alto in terms of being a liberaltarian.

Michael Calore: No, I go further left than that, I would say.

Zoë Schiffer: He sounds like maybe he’s Yang Gang.

Lauren Goode: Oh, the Yang Gang. I interviewed Andrew Yang once.

Michael Calore: Andrew Yang, he was one of the first big vocal proponents of universal basic income in the political sphere, wasn’t he?

Lauren Goode: Yes, he was indeed.

Michael Calore: Well, I don’t know anything else about him, so I can’t say whether or not I’m actually Yang Gang.

Lauren Goode: Mike’s going to start another third party just for UBI.

Michael Calore: Oh, boy. There’s no government like no government, I always say.

Lauren Goode: Do you say that?

Michael Calore: OK, Lauren, I’m going to kick it back to you. Where do you think this is headed in the future?

Lauren Goode: I am really struggling to say where this is all headed politically because I am so confused by what is happening in politics right now and still trying to sort it out. I do think that there are going to be more factions of self-proclaimed libertarianism and people co-opting some ideals from the left and the right. But I do think the original word is losing its meaning.

Michael Calore: Agreed. I like this new word, liberaltarian.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, but once again, it’s from 2020 and things change fast.

Michael Calore: Zoe, what about you?

Zoë Schiffer: I think we’re going to see more privatization than before. Right now, we have people like Elon Musk, who is supposedly going to be coleading with Vivek Ramaswamy the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and they want to get rid of the Department of Education. So I’m guessing we’re going to see private-sector solutions to the things that government used to solve.

Lauren Goode: And on our next episode of Uncanny Valley, we’re going to unpack all of the very successful companies who have been led by two CEOs at the same time.

Michael Calore: All right. Well, thanks to both of you for this discussion about libertarianism and liberaltarianism in Silicon Valley.

Lauren Goode: Thanks for being our guide, Mike. See you on the seastead.

Michael Calore: See you on the seastead.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, thank you both. I’m happy to know a little bit more about Ayn Rand, I think.

Lauren Goode: Zoe, when you get inside of DOGE, will you bring your report to this podcast first, please?

Zoë Schiffer: Oh, yeah. I’ll be reporting live from DOGE, but just for Uncanny Valley.

Michael Calore: I’ll be reporting live from a platform 25 miles off the coast of California where I set my own laws.

Lauren Goode: And I’ll be putting my predictions for the actual DOGE on Polymarket at the same time or something. What a time to be alive.

Michael Calore: Indeed. Well, that is our show for today. We’ll be out next week, but we’ll be back the following week with an episode all about Sam Altman. Thank you for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you like what you heard today, or even if you didn’t, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, you can write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. Today’s show was produced by Kyana Moghadam. Amar Lal at MacroSound mixed this episode. Jordan Bell is our executive producer. Thanks also to executive producer Stephanie Kariuki. Condé Nast’s head of global audio is Chris Bannon.